Google has announced that it is going to stop supporting Microsoft’s browser Internet Explorer version 6.0. It says that the browser is slow and buggy which could pose a threat to the internet.

Killing IE6 implies that Google would stop supporting their services such as YouTube and Google Docs on the browser. Nearly everyone in today’s world use these Google services and they are an essential part of their internet experience. By not being able to use these services, IE6 users would have no choice but to switch their browser or upgrade their version of Internet Explorer. YouTube would do this by 13th of March. Users could watch videos on the browser but new features won’t work. Google Docs and Google sites hosting services would stop on 1st March, 2010.

Google has taken a stand to remove the browser as it even was involved in the recent China attack. Much of the measured IE 6 usage originates in China. According to NetApplications, IE 6 is still used by 20% of the surfers worldwide.

The kill IE6 mission was a bit of a success . But now it seems that Google has taken the responsibility of completely killing Internet Explorer 6.0.
A mail was sent by Google to many users and here’s what it said:

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

On January 27th Apple is going to release a new product which will most probably change the way people have been interacting with their Computers and Mobile Phones. The release of the iSlate or iPad will mark the beginning of a whole new era of computing!

The iSlate is to be announced during an event to be held at San Francisco.

The iSlate is rumored to have great innovative features such as Huge Screen with IPS technology, iWork compatibility and more. Another feature should be that ,the iSlate must be completely Voice enabled with support for Speech recognition. If iWork is to be accustomed with the iSlate, then Speech recognition will help a lot of business users. Two microphones should be built in which would enhance the use of Skype and other such services. Just by speaking the name of an application, the iSlate must be compatible enough to pop it up.

Microsoft’s Project Natal has been designed to recognize words such as “Good Night” which would just switch it off.
The Apple Tablet must also be compatible with similar technologies.

Voice Input must work with any application which has text input available, just as the Nexus One. Music Search, Hands free Dialing, Posting Tweets by your voice,News,Sports and Weather and Battery Remaining could be great!

In just three days, we’ll find out whether the iSlate does support these features or not!

Microsoft says a security flaw in its Internet Explorer browser played a role in the recent computer attacks against Google and at least 20 other companies. They said the security hole can be closed by setting browser’s Internet security to “High”. The company has also released an update to fix the problem.

Spending a week without using any of the Google products would be very difficult for a geek!
We at AppleGoogle plan to undertake this painstaking task and also provide our users with alternatives to Google products. This we think will make our users even more aware of the importance of Google in our daily lives.
Let the show begin!

DAY 1:

Google Search – It all started for Google with its search engine. And now they are up with so many products and services. So today,we have taken up the challenge of trying to survive without the Google search engine. Google’s search is a product which every Internet user would definately use while surfing the World Wide Web. There are a lot of alternatives to the search like Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo, Metasearch,Ask, Lycos etc. We would use all these and try to get our jobs done without Google.
Starting up with Bing! We found Bing to be compelling and even the iPhone app was nearly as good as Google. Bing rendered all the searches nearly similar to that of Google but it did not have the plain background that Google has. It was a lot distractive due to the background picture and related search terms beside the results!

Next up was Yahoo! Yahoo’s user interface was very very distracting. The homepage had a lot of advertisements along with a list of other yahoo products and the search box was on the top. In fact yahoo took a bit of time to open up when compared to Bing and Google. The search results were accurate and good! It didn’t seem to differ much. But it did not display real time results and also it was unable to locate a lot of small pages.
Ask was another good search engine!
But in the end it turns out to be that no one can defeat Google, though Bing is a close competitor.Inviting AppleGoogle patrons to share their experiences on other search engines vis a vis Google.

Google’s latest cloud based play will give users the ability to upload any kind of file to Google Docs. The file intensifies cloud services from Google and indicates that Google is slowly trying to move its users to the cloud.
Picasa a free cloud based photo sharing from Google also aims to do so.

Now users can upload any file upto 250MB on Google docs. It need not be in Spreadsheet, Word format. It could be anything!
The free cloud-based storage from Google increases its competition against Microsoft, as Google offers a free online alternative to productivity software applications like Microsoft Office.

Google Docs users will gain 1GB of space along with the ability to store any file type that’s up to 256MB online.The online files will be can be searched, organized and shared, just like Google Docs documents.

Users can even purchase additional online storage space for US$0.25 per GB per year!

The iPhone/iPod touch app for this week is surprisingly Bing. Bing as we all know is a search engine from Microsoft! The bing app for the iPhone will well move a lot of Google users on the iPhone to this new app.
Though Google does have it’s own app for the iPhone but Bing offers a much better UI with great additional features.

The Bing app is FREE for download on the iTunes Store. As soon as the app is launched it tries to acquire your current location so that it could open up your country’s wallpaper of the day, news etc.

The wallpaper by Bing which changes everyday covers the whole screen making the status bar transparent which is awesome. It then has options to choose from like images, news, maps etc.
The app is very well designed and even sports a voice to text input for searching on Bing.
The Bing app is truly the App for the week!!!!!

Palm chief executive and former iPod chief Jon Rubinstein said in an interview at CES that he has never used an iPhone.
Earlier in 2009 even Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer also did laugh at the iPhone during a press conference, and now we have got Palm’s CEO! It seems that both the companies are unable to compete with the iPhone and hence their CEO’s are doing nothing except criticizing the best device of the generation!

Of course, if Rubinstein is telling the truth, such a lack of dabbling in a rival’s pool could explain, at least in part, why Palm is having a hard time catching up to the iPhone’s market share. The Palm Pre has fared so-so at Sprint Nextel Corp., despite a lot of hype surrounding launches of the various iterations; and the more budget version of the Pre, the Palm Pixi, appears to have made little splash. Palm is due to start selling handsets through Verizon Wireless.

Palm has reason to fear Android: Mobile analytics firm Flurry Inc. says it has “monitored a sharp increase in new Android project starts by application developers within its system, a 94 percent jump in October compared to September,” according to its blog.

We suggest him to use the iPhone and only then would he come to know the power of Apple and also get to know where his company stands!

CES or the Consumer electronics show was held at Las Vegas this year and as usual it gave new and big companies to show off their products to journalists and the press. This time a lot of tablets were shown off at CES. the lenovo IdeaPad U1 and HP-Microsoft’s new tablet PC and maybe the apple tablet or islate on January 26th.

But Apple’s tablet may not end up dominating the emerging market for tablets, as some seem to expect. One reason is price. Analysts think the Apple tablet could cost anywhere from $700 to $1,000. In contrast, the tablet design unveiled by Freescale this week will cost around $130 to manufacture and could sell for as little as $200.
Conversations with several former Apple engineers who worked on the long-gestating tablet also suggest that Apple may be asking users to learn a somewhat complex new vocabulary of finger gestures to control it, making use of technology it acquired in the 2007 purchase of a company called FingerWorks.

The price of the Apple Tablet is quite high when compared to other tablets. A 1000$ for a tablet? I mean cmon why wouldn’t someone just pay a few more and get an iMac or MacBook pro.

Apple has even asked all it’s employees to keep it a secret and hopefully they will disclose the official price and the details by the end of this month. By the way the nexus one was also displayed at CES!

The apple tablet is supposed to be an ebook reader and a killer of the kindle. But the advantage kindle has is it’s large online book store.
Though apple is believed to have engaged in a deal with publishers and other book stores for displaying books on the iTunes store, but still it would take time for it to be as large as amazon’s book store . Be tuned for future updates!
islate was rumoured to come in 7 inch and 10 inch versions but other info seems to reveal that it will only be available in a 10.1in version.